| Bonnie Irwin After
another teaching and service-laden summer, I will be cheerfully entering
into my sabbatical, if I can still read Arabic and write a scholarly sentence.
If you see my name on a committee list or major university project, fit
me for a straightjacket. |
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| Donelle Ruwe Umme Al-Wazedi (a graduate student in English) and I co-authored a short essay called “Training Non-Native Teachers.” It will be published in the May/June issue of The Clearing-House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues, and Ideas. The article contrasts two different approaches to teaching James Joyce’s “Araby”—the lecture approach that Umme developed for classes in Bangladesh, and a discussion-centered approach that she developed when teaching freshmen students at Eastern. Fern Kory and I presented papers at the Modern Approaches to Children’s Literature Association Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. My paper, “The Violent Didactic in Original Poems for Infant Minds(1804),” examined the first collection of secular poetry written specifically for child readers. The authors, Jane Taylor, Ann Taylor (author of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”), Isaac Taylor, and Adelaide O’Keefe, created numerous poems featuring strong, powerful, commanding, domineering, and even violent mothers who had total control over their home and households. In later editions of this collection of children’s poems, the mother figures became more sentimentalized and affectionate and, as a consequence, far less powerful. I then linked this pattern of the sentimental mother to contemporary children’s books such as Love You Forever. |
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Richard Sylvia Four
of our Sigma Tau Delta members -- William Peck, Stephanie Ernst, Tina
Gagliano, and Erica Gaesser -- traveled to Cincinnati last week to attend
the Sigma Tau Delta National Convention and collect two awards: 1) a Project
Grant Award for raising funds to provide the Hilltop Convalescent Center
with large print books, books on tape, and audio equipment; 2) a Superior
Performance Award for 2002 chapter activities. (Our application for the
Outstanding Chapter Award for 2002 activities was disqualified because
of an administrative error in the National offices. We should have won.) |
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| John Kilgore Westward,
Ho! On May 15 Dollie and I hit the road in our Chevy Suburban, towing
our new 30-foot camper trailer (you might be a redneck if your trailer
is 7 years newer than your tow vehicle), headed for the South Dakota Badlands,
Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, Spokane, Seattle, Vancouver, quite a few Wal-Mart
parking lots (they let you park your camper there for free), and Moscow,
Idaho, where my sister and her longtime partner are getting, er, hitched
on the 24th. Plans to rendezvous with friends and family at various points
are starting to look like the wiring diagrams for a 1984 Kaypro. A trip
we've wanted to take since 1979, and, given the logistics involved, a
good warmup for teaching my War Stories Senior Seminar in July. |
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John Guzlowski The big news is that I am feeling better, and I think I'm almost over my pneumonia. Now, everything else: I read poems from my book, Language of Mules, at the Silesian Regional Library in Katowice, Poland, and Maria Curie Skladowska University in Lublin, Poland, over spring break. I also delivered a lecture on "Isaac Singer and the Threat of America" at Skladowska University. My poem "What the War Taught Her" about my mom's experiences among the Germans during World War II was selected for Poems for Peace, an online anthology of anti-war poems. |
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| Frank McCormick I have been notified that my article entitled "Walpole's Castle of Otranto and Vanbrugh's Pseudo-Medieval Compound at Greenwich" will be published in the March 2004 issue of Notes and Queries. My review of Robert Mack's book Thomas Gray: A Life appeared in the November 2002 issue of H-Albion. My essay entitled "Writing About Poetry: A Teacher-Modeled Exercise" will appear in the summer 2003 issue of the Illinois English Bulletin. And my article entitled "A Source for Isaiah Thomas's 'Parody on Shakespeare'" has been accepted for publication in English Language Notes.
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